A Piece of Dirt 2019
Biennale Urbana Venice 2019
We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than we do about the ground beneath our feet (Leonardo da Vinci).
Soils are usually regarded as dirt in urban culture – which is another reason why they are neglected. The „pedosphere“, that skin of the earth’s crust, the sphere at our feet, is the primordial ground of all life and of particular significance to Venetians as the earthly interface of sea level. Due to rising sea levels and because the sandy subsoil sinks several millimetres a year, its disappearance threatens the basis for urban existence.
In Jutta Ravenna’s work „A Piece of Dirt“, the water level of Venice is sonified and transformed into sound. The site of the performance installation, the disused military installation „Caserma Pepe“ , is located on the Lido, Venice’s beach, not far from the historic centre of Venice. The volume of the sound sources sunk into resonance tubes made of earth correlates with values of the current local water level of Venice, whereby the sound is manually damped by different amounts of earth directly on the membrane of the loudspeakers. of the speakers. The earth damping differs according to the water level.
The measured values for the earth damping of the sound installation are based on forecasts from the tide station Venezia, Italy, Acqua Alta Oceanografic Tower of the National Research Council, CNR. In cooperation with the Venetian Sound Map project of the Insituto per la Musica and the Conservatorio Di Musica Benedetto Marcello connected online, you can hear the railway station, the Piazza di San Marco, the Accademia, churches, water canals, the Grand Canal and the Accademia water bus stop.
